Table, Chair, and Two Glasses
Looking for contrasts, I stumbled upon this color contrast of a yellow chair and a blue table. The transparent fragile glasses also added a little context contrast to the sturdy chair and table. I added a tittle Topaz Impression to give the simple image a little more interest.
Art, Color and Beauty are Everywhere
I recently attended a contemplative photography retreat at beautiful Hui Ho’olana on Moloka’i. The next several posts will be from the retreat.
Beauty was everywhere I looked. It presented itself along every path, around every corner. It seemed that it was just asking to be photographed.
Red, green and yellow
Spiked leaves shoot out like a star
Just asking to be noticed
Sandhill Crane Landing Abstract
Last spring I took 3500 images of Sandhill Cranes near Othello, WA in a 3-day period. After the trip, I quickly went through and picked a couple of my favorites. Today, I decided to go back and pick out a few more of my best images. I found this one of a crane landing in a field. I used an equivalent of a 600mm lens, but still did not get a good close-up. This image was further enlarged by a factor of 4. As expected, the resultant image was not very sharp.
So what can you do with a fuzzy image??? Why not try an abstract processing method. I used Topaz Impression to get this result.
Lesson Learned: Don’t take so many darn images. It is a real pain to review 3500 images. (I am still not done.) I took a break to post this one.
For reference, below is my original image:
Seattle Japanese Garden
Monet’s may have painted the entrance bridge of the garden from this perspective … maybe, maybe not.
Thank you Topaz Impression.
Boat Graveyard & Repair Facility – Charleston, Oregon
I spent a couple of hours exploring an old boat graveyard in Charleston, Oregon, I was fascinated with all the chipped paint on the old boats from a by-gone era. They had seen a much better time. I can just imagine the stories these old boats could tell. I picked an image at random and played with it in Topaz Impression. I applied a Van Gogh painting style as an overlay. Today I needed a break from reality
Roseate Spoonbill
I needed a little change of pace and started reviewing some photographs from an earlier wildlife photography trip. In my review, I found this “fellow” just waiting to be processed and displayed.
Lesson Learned: It pays to go back and review old images from time to time.
Face Abstract – Valley of Fire, Yellowstone National Park
Photography has taught me to keep my eyes open and be ready to see the unusual. Walking along a path in Yellowstone’s Valley of Fire, I gazed down into a bubbling hot spring and saw this face looking up at me. I stopped worked the scene and captured an image. On my computer, I softened the image and added a little impressionistic touch. Can you see the face?
Photography, vision, and imagination go hand in hand.
Onomea Falls Water Color
I recently visited the Hawaiian Botanical Gardens, near Hilo, Hawaii. My mission was to photograph creatively. I did not focus on the overall beauty of the environment around me. My focus was on separate scenes, small vignettes, and macro detail while using creative photographic techniques.
For this image, I took multiple exposures covering the range from the bright water and sky to the dark shadows. When I brought them together into an HDR, all the tonalities were captured. However, I lost the feeling of the dense tropical rainforest setting. So I decided to play a little with Topaz’s new ‘Studio” software. I used the watercolor effect to create this image.
I haven’t given up on the natural presentation of this image yet. It will require a lot of luminance masking with layers to get the natural image that I saw in my mind. I will do this at a future time when I am in a very patient mood.
Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 1
Sometimes it is just fun to play around with images. I knew that I would use various ways of post processing when I first took the image. Here is one version. Playing around a little more, I came up with the following abstract :
Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 2
Multiple Exposure: Dogwood Blooms and Asphalt Pavement
I got a little bored shooting in the garden. Nothing was “Popping” for me. So I thought I would have a little fun with multiple exposures. This image is a combination of a Pink Dogwood branch and a texture photo of a section of asphalt pavement. Magic happens.
To finish it off I decided to experiment a little with Topaz Impression. Here I used the Impasto I preset. Something a little different.